A Florida State University history professor whose ground-breaking
book on the "slave patrols" that terrorized slaves throughout the
pre-Civil War South will be featured in an upcoming History Channel
documentary.

The program, "Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters," takes a look at a
little-known aspect of the United States' ignominious history of
slavery -- the brutal system of slave patrols that existed from the
1700s through the Civil War, and that helped give rise to the Ku Klux
Klan during Reconstruction. The program is scheduled for broadcast on
Thursday, May 26, from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT.

Much of the information in "Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters" is
culled from "Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the
Carolinas," a book published in 2001 by Sally E. Hadden. Hadden, an
associate professor of history at FSU, was interviewed extensively
for and appears in the documentary.

"Someone at the History Channel read my book and decided there was a
story here," said Hadden, explaining how she came to be involved with
the documentary in 2004. A production company was contacted, a
"treatment" outlining the program was prepared, and the decision to
move forward with "Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters" ultimately was made.

"I went in and did about five or six hours of taping with them in
August of last summer," Hadden added. Excerpts from those interviews
appear prominently in the documentary.

In her book, Hadden analyzes the public regulation of slavery in
Virginia and the Carolinas, focusing on the slave patrols that
existed between roughly 1700 and 1865. The patrols were formed in
response to white Southerners' fears of lawlessness and even
insurrection on the part of the slaves, who outnumbered whites by
almost two to one in some areas.

Such fears were based in part on real events such as the Stono
Rebellion of 1739, in which dozens of slaves, most armed with knives
and guns and drunk, set out from Stono, S.C., for freedom in Florida,
murdering more than two dozen whites along the way. All of the slaves
who willingly participated in the rebellion were either killed that
day or later captured and executed.

Hadden shows how this and other rebellions led to a sense of paranoia
that manifested itself in the form of ever-increasing restrictions on
slaves throughout the South. Laws were passed requiring white males
from each community to serve on armed slave patrols, which had the
authority to enter slave owners' plantations without a warrant to
monitor the activities of slaves; to stop unaccompanied slaves
anywhere and require them to produce identification passes; and even
to inflict violence, without penalty, on any slave found to be
breaking the law.

"The relationship between master and slave was not the only nexus of
violence," Hadden said, since "the state - through patrols - played
an important role in legitimizing and using violence against slaves.
Violence wasn't confined simply to slave masters, as most people think."

While much of "Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters" describes the system
of slave policing, the documentary also looks at another
often-overlooked aspect of the era - the strength and ingenuity of
the enslaved. In the South, bounty hunters sometimes lost against the
intelligence and fight-to-the-death courage of the runaway slaves
they sought to recapture. And in the North, slave catchers sometimes
were defeated by an organized and armed free black community. While
the historical record doesn't contain many personal accounts by
runaway slaves of their experiences, the documentary's producers did
take pains to tell the slaves' stories of courage through the use of
dramatic reenactments, archival material and interviews with scholars.

"Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters" closes in the aftermath of the
Civil War, as the newly freed people work to build communities,
farms, schools and churches. But the system of slave patrols had not
disappeared entirely - it was soon reborn during Reconstruction in an
even more violent form: the Ku Klux Klan.

"The Klan was an extension of slave patrols in most direct, obvious
ways," said Hadden. "They've changed the names from patrols to Klan,
they've put on sheets, but the activities and the purpose remain
pretty much the same."

A member of FSU's history department since 1995, Hadden has taught on
early and Revolutionary America and the Old South. She is currently
working on a book that documents the cultural history of the legal
system in 18th century America, focusing on the legal communities in
Philadelphia, Boston and Charleston, S.C.